Category: Michigan History

An MSU professor wrote a book entitled Where the Boys Are. The subsequent movie made the yearly college Spring Break a cultural phenomenon for over 50 years.

Captain Aaron Peer founded Grindstone City as a company with quarry operations in 1834. Peer, is one of the earliest settlers of Huron County and holds title to many of the "firsts" in the Upper Thumb.

A large Midwest map of the Pere Marquette Railway for Michigan's Summer Resorts 1913

President Nixion visits Bad Axe Michigan to campaign for a special election during April 1974, just days before the Watergate scandal hits his administration.

In the late 1840s, Michigan experienced a craze of building plank roads. Over 200 companies built over 5000 miles of plank roads.

Henry Ford was instrumental in the development of the charcoal market in the 1920s to market leisure motoring.

This picture of a street scene in Pigeon, Michigan is thought to be taken right around 1900. The amusement parlor or penny arcade was popular in the 1890s through the early 1900s. These storefront shops were stocked with slot machines, phonographs, muscle testing machines, guess your …